Marriage Quote by Clifford Odets

Odets boils a whole domestic power struggle down to a comedian’s clean binary: in marriage, someone gets to be the “author,” and someone becomes the citation. The joke lands because it borrows the language of public life - quotation, authority, attribution - and drags it into the kitchen, where status is supposedly irrelevant but never actually is. To “quote” a spouse can read as admiration, but it also implies control: whose words get repeated, whose worldview becomes the household’s default setting, whose opinions are treated as reusable wisdom rather than one-off noise.

The line’s slyness is that it pretends to describe a neutral difference in marital style while quietly indicting the hierarchy underneath. A marriage where the husband quotes the wife feels, historically, like an exception worth noting; a marriage where the wife quotes the husband is the old script, so common it stops looking like a script at all. Odets doesn’t need to say “patriarchy” for the imbalance to register. He simply points to how authority reproduces itself through repetition.

As a playwright of the Depression-era stage, Odets was obsessed with the way people speak themselves into roles shaped by class, gender, and aspiration. This aphorism has the snap of dialogue you can imagine in a cramped apartment: half flirt, half accusation. It suggests that intimacy isn’t just shared feelings; it’s a negotiation over whose language becomes the shared language, and whether love is a duet or a monologue with an echo.